Historically, meat products have been butchered and packaged in each supermarket or other retail outlet. It has long been recognized that this arrangement is extremely inefficient and expensive. Instead, it would be preferable to permit the meat to be butchered and packaged at an efficient facility which benefits from economies of scale and thereafter to be shipped to individual supermarkets or other retail outlets.
In the past, this desirable goal has not been achievable because most consumers prefer to buy meat which is red in color as a result of exposure to oxygen. However, the meat maintains its red color for only one or two days. Thereafter, if the meat was butchered and packaged in one location and then shipped to another location for eventual sale, by the time the package reached the retail outlet the meat would have undergone the transformation to the purple color and would be effectively unsalable.
To overcome these problems, there have been a number of efforts to maintain the food product in a first atmosphere during shipping and a second atmosphere when the meat product is ready for retail sale. Therefore, it is highly desirable to provide a package that would permit remote meat preparation and subsequent sale after the passage of more than a couple of days. It is equally desirable to have an apparatus and method for packaging such products in an efficient and cost-effective way despite the fact that most consumers would prefer not to invest a large amount of money in elaborate packages.
Thus, it should be apparent that there is a continuing need to solve the longstanding problem of providing a package which permits meat or other food products to be packaged at one location and then to be sold sometime later under different conditions. One approach to solving these problems which has shown considerable commercial promise is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,348,752 to Michael P. Gorlich. In this patent, a depression is provided in the tray which allows the cutting blade to cut plastic film from a web in place on a tray without damaging the packaging.
Particular problems may arise in packaging meat, such as ground beef, in a modified atmosphere package. Because of the process used to grind meat, air is entrained in the product. The air is released to the package, upsetting the predetermined atmosphere. Particularly where very low oxygen contents are otherwise achievable inside the packaging, the release of entrained oxygen from ground meat once inside the package may reduce the modified packaging efficacy.